With new building construction or renovation, a closet flange is typically installed prior to installation of finished flooring. To do so, a hole is made through the sub-flooring at a desired location for a toilet. The hole is sized to accommodate a closet flange. There are, then, several options in the prior art to install a closet flange through the hole in the sub-flooring. In one option, a closet flange is directly fastened to the sub-flooring, and a finished flooring is installed about the closet flange. With the closet flange fixed to the sub-flooring, however, the finished flooring extends above the closet flange, thus not permitting a direct connection between a toilet and the closet flange. To allow for a proper sealed connection, closet flange extenders have been developed in the prior art to increase the height of the closet flange to that of the finished flooring, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,384,910 to Prodyma, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,224 to Hodges. As can be appreciated by those skilled in the art, the closet flange extenders are in contact with any fluid flow from the toilet bowl and provide undesired additional leakage points.
To avoid closet flange extenders, closet flanges have been installed with spacers to elevate the closet flanges above the sub-flooring. Typically, materials available at a building site have been used as the spacers to elevate a closet flange. For example, pieces of copper tubing or wood have been wedged between a closet flange and a sub-flooring to elevate the closet flange. Ideally, the spacers allow finished flooring to be installed flush below the closet flange, thereby allowing a toilet to rest on the finished flooring and be directly connected to the closet flange without any closet flange extenders. However, the scrap material spacers often either do not provide sufficient elevation to accommodate the thickness of the finished flooring, thus not permitting a finished flooring to fit between the closet flange and the sub-flooring, or provide an elevation greater than the thickness of the finished flooring, thereby elevating the closet flange more than desired (the toilet may not rest flush on the finished flooring). In either scenario, undesired adjustment of the closet flange height is required.
The problem of coordinating a finished closet flange height and finished flooring has been recognized in the prior art and several solutions have been proposed. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,065,160 to Winn proposes a threaded closet flange which may have its height adjusted by rotation. U.S. Pat. No. 6,751,812 to Malloy proposes a closet flange having a thickened flange portion which coincides with the thickness of a finished floor. The Malloy closet flange is a unitary piece. U.S. Pat. No. 6,443,495 to Harmeling proposes a closet flange having elevation structures located thereabout to provide spacing between the sub-flooring and the closet flange. As with the Malloy closet flange, the Harmeling closet flange is also a unitary structure. U.S. Pat. No. 5,996,134 to Senninger proposes the use of a spacer equivalent to the height of a poured concrete sub-flooring to raise the closet flange above the sub-flooring.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,581,214 to Love et al. discloses a spacer and shim assembly for raising a closet flange. Stackable spacers of equal thickness are provided. The spacers are stacked to achieve a required thickness and are provided with detents to prevent rotation therebetween. Once stacked, the spacers have tabs which are fastened to a sub-flooring, and a closet flange is fixed to the spacers, not to the sub-flooring.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/269,022, filed Nov. 8, 2005 and PCT International Application No. PCT/US2006/10669, filed Mar. 23, 2006, disclose closet flange spacers for supporting a closet flange above a sub-flooring. The disclosed spacers are well-suited for new installations, where a closet flange has yet to be installed. However, in existing installations where closet flanges are already installed, such as in renovations, the closet flange would have to be detached from the sub-flooring and a closet flange re-installed to be used with the disclosed closet flange spacers. It is desired to provide a toilet connection flush with a finished flooring to avoid not only prior art closet flange extenders, but also disassembly of an installed closet flange.